As cellular technologies continue to evolve, cellular networks remain “heterogeneous” in the sense that they support both legacy technologies and new technologies. These heterogeneous networks allow legacy devices to communicate with newer devices. Still, the new technologies can provide improved performance to mobile devices that support the new technologies. For example, a new mobile device that is capable of using a super wideband audio codec, such as Enhanced Voice Services (EVS), for a voice call is capable of providing clearer-sounding calls, and/or extended range for the voice call, which can allow a user to continue a voice communication session at a greater distance from the serving access point (AP) or in much poorer radio conditions as compared to other, legacy audio codecs, such as the Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) audio codec.
However, the performance improvements that new technologies are capable of providing are not being fully realized in current cellular networks. As an illustrative example, consider a cellular network supporting both EVS and AMR audio codecs. Whether a mobile device is employing an EVS codec or an AMR codec during an ongoing communication session is generally known to the Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core network (sometimes referred to as the “IMS core”, or the “Core Network (CN)”) via the application layer, but the same is not true for the radio access network (RAN) used to connect the mobile device to the IMS core. In fact, the RAN is “codec-agnostic” in the sense that the bitstreams flowing through the RAN are not treated differently based on the codecs associated with those bitstreams. There is currently no way for components at the RAN level to differentiate between an AMR bitstream and an EVS bitstream. As a consequence, radio control parameters that are designed for AMR voice traffic are utilized at the RAN level for all bitstreams carrying speech data, and, as a consequence, the performance improvements that new technologies are capable of providing are not fully realized for the new mobile devices that support them.